His stories have been published in a large number of anthologies including Exotic Gothic 4, Terror Tales of the Cotswolds, Terror Tales of the Seaside, Where the Heart Is, At Ease with the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, Hauntings, Lovecraft Unbound and Year’s Best Fantasy 2013. This is his sixth appearance in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and he was also in The Very Best of Best New Horror.
A forthcoming collection will launch the Spectral Press “Spectral Signature Editions” imprint, while his novel The Devil’s Detective is due from Doubleday in the US and Del Rey in the UK early in 2015.
Unsworth reveals: “‘Into the Water’ was dragged out of me during a single weekend’s intensive writing, holed up in a log cabin in the Lake District in the middle of a bitterly cold winter. Its initial inspiration was something I’d seen during a swim in Salford Quays in Manchester a couple of summers earlier.
“I’d swum over a picnic table, standing feet in the mud and face upwards, at the bottom of the Quay, and had an immediate image of four of Lovecraft’s Innsmouth-tainted denizens seated around it, one lazily reaching out to take hold of some morsel of food drifting along in the currents above him. I’d never known quite what to do with the image until I was asked to contribute to Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, in which this tale first appeared. I realized that here was the opportunity I needed to work out precisely why those four were seated there and how they’d got there.
“The thing is, I’m not a big Lovecraft fan. Don’t get me wrong – I like the stories (some a great deal), but his stuff isn’t particularly what I have in my mind when I write. The stories are sometimes stuffy, a little claustrophobic (and not in a good way) and hysterical, despite a certain elemental power that the best of them contain. They’re rarely subtle, and sometimes veer dangerously close to cliché or stereotype. Consequently, I had to try and work out which bits of HPL’s mythos I wanted to take and what parts to leave, and how to then marry this to my own interests and concerns and style (assuming I have a style, of course).
“I started to think about the floods that have occurred in recent years (many of which I then managed to reference in the story) and why they might have happened if they weren’t merely the result of aberrant weather conditions. I wondered about how the Old Ones might be able to return, subtly at first so that no one realized until it was too late, and about how they might manipulate the world about them to their own ends, and ‘Into the Water’ was the result.
“I had a huge amount of fun kick-starting the end of the world sitting in that cabin in the Lakes as the world froze outside my window, imagining towns submerged and the land slowly being taken, inch by watery inch. I like things with tentacles and fins and blank, cold eyes, I like aquatic horror and I like the world I created for this story. Wherever he is, I hope that HPL approves.”
K APENDA WATCHED THE water, and the water ate the Earth.
“Isaac, the high street’s finally going under, we need to go and catch it,” said Needham from somewhere behind him. Kapenda raised his free hand in acknowledgement but didn’t move. Instead, he let his eye rise, up from the new channel of brown and churning floodwater to the bank above. The house’s foundations were exposed by the water so that it now teetered precariously on the edge of a gorge. Fall, thought Kapenda, fall, please. The house didn’t fall but it would, soon, and he hoped to be here when it did.
“Isaac!” Needham again. The talent was already at the high street, waiting. The talent was like a child, got fractious and bored if it wasn’t the centre of attention; Don’t keep the talent waiting, was the motto. Don’t annoy the talent was the rule. Sighing, Kapenda finally lowered the camera and turned to go.
It had rained for months, on and off. Summer had been a washout, the skies permanently thick with cloud, the sun an infrequent visitor. On the rare occasions the clouds broke and the sun struggled through, grounds steamed but didn’t dry out. The water table saturated upwards, the ground remaining sodden until the first of the winter storms came and the rivers rose and the banks broke and the water was suddenly everywhere.
They were less than a mile from the town, but the journey still took several minutes. The roads were swollen with runoff, thick limbs of water flowing down the gutters and pushing up from the drains, washing across the camber and constantly tugging at the vehicle. Kapenda wasn’t driving but he felt it, the way they pulled across the centre line and then back as Needham compensated. It had been like this for days now all across the south of England. Kapenda leaned against the window, peering at the rain and submerged land beyond the glass.
There were figures in the field.
Even at their reduced speed, they passed the little tableau too quickly for Kapenda to see what the figures were doing, and he had to crane back around to try and keep them in view. There were four of them, and they appeared to be crouching so that only their shoulders and heads emerged from the flooded pasture. One was holding its arms to the sky. There was something off about the shape of the figures – the arms held to the clouds were too long, the heads too bulbous. Were they moving? Still? Perhaps they were one of those odd art installations you sometimes came across, like Gormley’s standing figures on Crosby beach. Kapenda had filmed a segment on them not long after they had been put in place, and watching as the tide receded to reveal a series of bronze, motionless watching figures had been quite wonderful and slightly unnerving. Had they done something similar here?
The rain thickened, and the figures were lost to its grey embrace.
The talent, a weasel of a man called Plumb whose only discernible value was a smoothly good-looking face and a reassuring yet stentorian voice, was angry with Needham and Kapenda. As Kapenda framed him in shot so that the new river flowing down Grovehill’s main street and the sandbagged shops behind it could be seen over Plumb’s shoulder, Plumb was moaning.
“We’ve missed all the dramatic stuff,” he said.
“We’ve not,” said Needham. “Just trust in Isaac, he’ll make you look good.”
“It’s not about me looking good,” said Plumb, bristling, brushing the cowlick of hair that was drooping over his forehead. “It’s about the story.”
“Of course it is,” said Needham. “Now, have you got your script?”
They didn’t get the lead item on the news, but they did get the second-string item, a cut to Plumb after the main story so that he could intone his description of Grovehill’s failed flood defences. Kapenda had used the natural light to make Plumb seem larger and the water behind darker, more ominous. He was happy with the effect, especially the last tracking shot away from the talent to look up the street, lost under a caul of fast-moving flood whose surface rippled and glittered. The water looked alive, depthless and hungry, something inexorable and unknowable.
Now that, thought Kapenda, is how to tell a story, and only spotted the shape moving through the water when he was reviewing the footage a couple of hours after it had gone out. It was a dark blur just below the waves, moving against the current and it vanished after perhaps half a minute. Something tumbling through the flow, Kapenda thought, and wished it had broken the surface – it would have made a nice image to finish the film on.
Plumb had found an audience.
They were in the bar of the pub where they were staying: the tiny, cramped rooms the only place available. The flood had done the hospitality industry a world of good, Kapenda thought; every room in the area was taken with television and print reporters.
“Of course, it’s all global warming’s fault,” Plumb said.
“Is it?” said the man he was talking to. The man’s voice was deep and rich, accented in a way Kapenda always thought of as old-fashioned. It was the voice of the BBC in the 1950s, of the Pathé newsreels. He punctuated everything he said with little coughs, as though he had something caught in his throat.
“Of course,” said Plumb, drawing on all the knowledge he had gained from reading one-and two-minute sound-bite pieces for local an
d, more latterly, national news. “The world’s heating up, so it rains more. It’s obvious.”
“It’s as simple as that,” said the man, and caught Kapenda’s eye over Plumb’s shoulder. One of his eyes was milky and blind, Kapenda saw, and then the man, disconcertingly, winked his dead eye and smiled.
“He really is an insufferable fool, isn’t he?” the man said later to Kapenda, nodding at Plumb, who was now holding court in the middle of a group of other talents. What’s the collective noun for the talent, thought Kapenda? A showoff? A blandness? A stupidity? He moved a forefinger through a puddle of spilled beer on the table, swirling it out to make a circle. The man, whose name was David, dipped his own fingers in the puddle and made an intricate pattern on the wood with the liquid before wiping it away.
“He thinks he understands it,” said David, and gave one of his little coughs. “But he doesn’t.”
“What is there to understand?” asked Needham. “It’s rain. It comes down, it floods, we film it and he talks about it and tries to look dramatic and knowledgeable whilst wearing an anorak that the viewers can see and wellingtons that they can’t.”
“This,” said David, waving a hand at the windows and the rain beyond. He was drunk; Needham was drunker. “It’s not so simple as he wants to believe. There are forces at work more complex than mere global warming.” He coughed again, a polite rumble.
“Pollution?” said Needham. Kapenda thought of his camera, of the eye he held to his shoulder to see the world, about how he’d frame this discussion. One at each edge of the screen, he decided, in tight close-up, David’s opaque eye peering into the lens as Needham’s head bobbed back and forth, up and down, like a bird. Needham was a good producer and director because he stressed over the little details, but a bad drinking companion because he got like a terrier over tiny fragments of information.
“Pollution? Possibly, but no answer about the Earth is that simple. Why is the water rising so fast? So far? Mere geography, or something more? My point is that we look to the wrong places for answers, because the real answers have faces too terrible to contemplate,” said David and then stood. He was tall and solid, not fat exactly but well built, his waistcoat straining under the pressure from his ample belly.
“You’re looking in the wrong place, all of you.” And with that, nodding his thanks for the company, David turned and walked away. Kapenda grinned at the look of confusion on Needham’s face, saw that Plumb was heading back their way and quickly rose himself.
“I need a walk,” he said.
“A swim, surely?” said Needham, and he and Plumb laughed. Kapenda did not reply.
The pub was on a hill – it was why it remained mostly unaffected by the storms and the rising floodwater. The rain was coming in near-horizontal sweeps now, gusting along in cold breaths that made Kapenda shiver. Lightning crackled somewhere over the fields, followed by thunder that reminded him of David’s voice and cough. The forecasters were saying that this storm would burn itself out in the next day or so, but they’d said that before and been wrong. The previous week, the rains had continued through the period they’d confidently predicted would be dry, and the groundwater rose and rose. What had he come outside for? Not air, not even to be away from Needham and Plumb, not really.
Kapenda went down towards the lights that were strung out along Grovehill’s main street. Generators, housed in the nearby community hall, powered the lamps and rope barriers and prevented him from getting to the water. Even at this time of night, news crews were clustered along the ropes, each filming or preparing for filming. He tried to look at the scene as though he was holding his camera – was there something here not about the floods but about the press response to it? No, that had been done.
There had to be something new, some fresh angle. As the rain pattered down around him, Kapenda thought. What was the weirdest thing he’d seen since this all started? He’d been in the tiny town of Chew Stoke a few weeks earlier, filming the remains of a vehicle that had been washed into a culvert and whose driver had died. In Grovehill, no one had died yet but there were abandoned cars strewn along the streets and surrounding tracks, hulking shapes that the water broke around and flowed over in fractured, churning flurries.
That was old. Every television station had those shots. He’d been there the year before when the police had excavated a mud-filled railway tunnel and uncovered the remains of two people who had been crushed in a landslide. What they needed was something like that here, something that showed how weak man’s civilized veneer was when set against nature’s uncaring ferocity. He needed something that contrasted human frailty and natural strength, something that Dali might have painted – a boat on a roof, or a shark swimming up the main street. He needed that bloody house to collapse.
What about the figures in the field?
Actually, the fields were a good starting point. They had flooded heavily and most were under at least four or five feet of water, but due to some quirk of meteorology or geography the water on them was sitting calm. Somewhere, he thought, somewhere there’s an image in that smooth expanse that I can use.
Kapenda waited until morning, and such light as came with sunrise, before investigating. He left a note for Needham, who likely wouldn’t be up until mid-morning anyway, and drove back along the roads towards the field. Through the windscreen, the road ahead of him moved like a snake, constantly surging and writhing.
The dark shape was in the first field he came to, drifting slowly along, spinning. Kapenda saw it through the tangle of hedgerow and stopped, climbing out into knee-high water and lifting his camera to his shoulder. He couldn’t see well, was too low, so climbed onto the vehicle’s doorsill and then higher, onto its roof. Was this the field where he had seen the figures? He thought it was, although there was no sign of them now. From his raised vantage point, he saw what the shape was, and started filming.
It was a dead cow. It was already bloating, its belly swelling from the gases trapped within, and its eye peered at him with baleful solemnity. Its tongue trailed from its open mouth, leached to a pale grey by the water. Its tail drifted after it like an eel. There was another beyond it, he saw, and more beyond that. A herd, or flock, or whatever a group of cows was called, trapped by the water and drowned.
Drowned? Well, probably, but one of the further animals looked odd. Kapenda zoomed in, focusing as he did so. The dead creature’s side was a ragged mess, with strips of peeled flesh and hide along its flank exposing the muscles below. Here and there, flashes of white bone were visible. Its neck was similarly torn, the vertebrae visible through the damaged flesh. As he filmed, the creature span more violently as a current caught it, slamming it into a tree trunk; the collision left scraps of meat clinging to the bark. Kapenda carried on filming as the cow whirled away, watching as it caught on something under the water, jerked and then suddenly submerged, bobbing back up before vanishing again. A great bubble of air, so noxious Kapenda could smell it from his distant perch, emerged from where the cow had gone down.
It was as Kapenda climbed down from the roof that he saw the thing in the hedgerow.
It was jammed, glinting, into the tangle of branches and leaves about four feet from the ground. From the surface of the water, he amended. Leaving his camera in the jeep, he moved cautiously towards the glint, feeling ahead with his feet. The ground dropped away as he stepped off the solid surface of the road, the water rising against him. It came to his thighs and then his waist; he took his wallet and phone from his jeans and zipped them into his jacket’s inner pocket; they were already in plastic bank bags, sealed against the damp. Carefully, not wanting to slip, lose his footing and be washed away like the cows, he leaned into the hedgerow and pushed his arm into it. The thing was tantalisingly out of reach. He pushed in harder, felt his feet shift along the submerged earth and then he was over, falling into the water and going under.
It was cold, clenching his head in its taut embrace and squeezing. Kapenda kicked but his feet tangled
into something – branches or roots – and were held fast. Something large and dark, darker than the water around him, banged into him, began to roll over him and force him further under the water. He wanted to breathe, knew if he opened his mouth he’d take in water and drown, and clenched his jaw. The thing on him was heavy, clamped onto his shoulder and was it biting him, Jesus yes, it was biting him and pushing him down and he was trapped, was under it and couldn’t shift it and then something grasped his other shoulder, hard, and he was pulled up from the water.
“No! No! Let him be!” It was David, hauling Kapenda from the water, pulling him back to the jeep. “What were you doing in the water? You could have bloody drowned!”
Kapenda collapsed to his knees, back into the water but held up by the jeep, and vomited. His breakfast came out in a soup of dirty liquid, the sight of it making him retch even more.
“Are you okay? Do you need to go to the doctor? The hospital?” David was calmer now, more concerned than angry.
“No,” said Kapenda after a moment. “I think I’m okay. What was it?”
“A dead cow,” said David after a moment. “What were you doing, going into the water?”
“I saw something in the hedge,” said Kapenda, and it sounded ridiculous even as he said it. He managed to rise to his feet, using the side of the jeep as a support. Water dripped from him.
“Let me see then,” said David. The man looked paler in the daylight, as though he was somehow less there, his dead eye bulging from a face that was round and wan. Its milky iris peered at Kapenda. His other eye was dark, the sclera slightly yellowing. Was he a heavier drinker than he’d appeared the night before? He had patches of rough skin, Kapenda saw, dried and peeling.
There was a bike leaning against the back of the jeep and Kapenda was suddenly struck with the image of David cycling down the centre of the road, his front wheel cutting a “V” though the water, his feet submerging and re-emerging with each revolution of the pedals, and it made him smile.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 23